by Joel Fernandes

MicroSD Card Remote Switch

Recently, I’ve been wanting to remotely be able to program a MicroSD card with a new bootloader or filesystem without removing the card from its embedded target board (such as a Beaglebone or Pandaboard). Due to the lack of any such existing tools, I decided to design my own board. Finally have got it working, below are some pictures and a screencast demo video of the switcher in action! I sprinkled some power and status LED to show the user what’s going on.

The base board requires two SparkFun MicroSD sniffers. The card cage on the sniffer is unused for my purposes. The switcher is controlled through an FTDI cable.
I also wrote up a switch program to control the switcher with libftdi. You just have to pass to it the FTDI’s serial number and whether you want to switch to host-mode (for programming the card) or target-mode (for booting the programmed card).
Hardware design files are available under a CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0 license.